


October Skies

by wanabi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Autumn, Baseball Gods - Freeform, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, Hockey Gods, Temporary Character Death, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20852894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanabi/pseuds/wanabi
Summary: Seasons overlap. The benches clear. It happens.





	October Skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).

> This was such an amazing prompt.
> 
> Post-reveals EDIT: So...I realized I never actually gifted this to the amazing prompter associated with it. :( Oops. I hope you enjoy your slightly-belated gift, but if it's unfashionably late, no worries! :)

"Come onnnnnnn," said the Grizzled One, He of the Unshaven Beards. "No mercy!"

"You already smell," said Grass-Bounce, She who delights in Ivy and all Monstrous Growths. "How is it only October, and you already smell?"

"The passage of the seasons is ever thus," said the Grizzled One. "For as the humans below cannot alter time, nor turn it backward in its orbits, so we too are bound, though the names of days vary with every tongue that rises and falls."

"We know it's October," pointed out the Sinew Lord. "That was a rhetorical question."

"Oh."

"What she means is, are your petitioners desperate enough to call upon you already? They've barely dropped any pucks, and already you're moaning like a mundialist. I'm trying to watch the playoffs here."

"Our petitioners," remarked Penal-Scourge, the Lady of Vengeance, "have awaited us since the first pond froze and the first blade was sharpened. You slight their faith!"

"We don't slight anything," Grass-Bounce retorted. "_Our_ devotees stand upright and don't grovel before us at the first sign of a slump."

"That's because you play nearly twice as many games as we do," the Grizzled One argued, "you can afford to take some time off."

Penal-Scourge giggled. "Careful. The last time someone brought up the nuances of the 162-game season, the Asterisk Adversary's tantrum caused five rainouts and two delays."

"Leave him out of this!" yelled the Sinew Lord.

"All right, all right," challenged the Great Goon. "You mess with my teammates, you mess with _me_."

In a moment the benches cleared. Leather slashed, wood splinters sparked, sprays of ice were flung in directions no Zamboni could smooth.

The fanatics on the earth below could not sense the full scale of what was happening, of course, but they felt their gods stirring. In Texas, grasshoppers the size of locusts fell from the stands in extra innings. In St. Paul, goal lights burned with a glow that pierced anyone who faced them head-on. The waters of the Allegheny River and McCovey Cove roared in defiance, drowning any home run ball that dared to trespass there. The Staples Center whirled and thrashed as if in the grip of an earthquake, although a few skeptical fans carried on as normal.

At last, the gods succumbed to cosmic referees like time and exhaustion dragging them apart, their anger spent. There would be no more meddling for the next several weeks; the critical baseball playoffs and the opening hockey games would be decided, of course, by players' skill on the field.

Only once the baseball fans had retreated to their hot stoves for the winter did the deities grudgingly declare a truce. "Words will not be enough to bind us," the Grizzled One recalled. "We need a sign."

"A sacrifice." Grass-Bounce nodded. "So be it."

To gods, of course, all places are sacred, and it is not so strange a thing that the same altar may at once be a scar in the ice and a mound with no borders. They will go to war for snippets of time, for time binds earthly minds as it does immortals, but the same stance may straddle any fields.

So it was that the scapegoats came forward, as they had countless times before and would again. The Sinister Bend, patron of left-handers, and the Broken Sieve, who netminders held in dread.

The baseball gods beat upon Sinister Bend's legs and face and dauntless arm with bats of thunder, bats with the bark and rings of living trees, bats that might have sprouted wings and blotted out the moon. And the hockey gods seized Broken Sieve's limbs and plunged her beneath the water, until every hole she might have left in her negative space was swallowed up in night.

They would return, of course. They always did. As cruel as fans' wishes could be, the gods would not curse mere humans--the terrible injuries that befell players were only to be expected with the repeated violent motions they subjected themselves to. Defeat was an agony for athlete and spectator alike, yet were not the gods themselves proof that some eternal victory existed beyond the walls of the fields humans could see?

Gods reserved true curses only for each other. Again and again, the scapegoats would bear the wrath of their teammates, and return as a reminder. Conflict in the heavens would only serve to distract the gods from their true duties to their patrons. And, for a season or so, there would be peace.

(Until the Stanley Cup finals stretched into _June_. But that's another story.)


End file.
